But that didn’t change the wrongness of it.
“Back row! Pass them up please,” Linnet said, her voice unpleasant and hard around the edges.
We snapped out of it. Dee passed her paper to the desk in front of her and Paul and I sent our identical outlines for Ballad up our rows. I folded my hands back on my desk, and as I did, I saw Paul’s slanted handwriting standing out against my blocky, square printing on my skin. He’d managed to find room to squeeze in the words females hurt my brain on my left hand. I raised an eyebrow at him and he gave me a look like, well it’s true, isn’t it?
A 42. Damn. I didn’t think I’d ever seen Dee get anything less than a B plus, and I remembered that one because she’d called me about it. She’d been programmed for technical perfection at birth; a grade like that had to be causing short-circuits and malfunctions across her system.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“I’d like for you to make your desks into groups of four,” Linnet called from the front. “Both sections have just finished reading and watching Hamlet and I’d like you to discuss it in small groups. I’ll be watching your participation and I’ll let Mr. Sullivan know how active you were in the discussion when he returns this afternoon.” She started rambling on about discussion questions on the board and she’d be reading our outlines while we talked and whatever, just get on with it, so we just started dragging our desks into circles which completely drowned her out with scraping metallic legs on the floor.
We ended up in a group with Paul, me, and Dee from the back row, and a third-row student who looked less than pleased to have been assimilated into a greater-than-fifty-percent-back-row group.
The less-than-pleased student was a girl named Georgia (who played the trumpet—I tried not to hold that against her) and she decided to take charge by reading the first question off the board. “Okay. First question. Which character from Hamlet do you identify with the most?”
I looked at Dee, really hard—the sort of look that not only forces people into one spot but also burns holes into them big enough to stick pencils through—and said, “Ophelia, because no one told her what the hell was going on, so she killed herself.”
Dee blinked.
Georgia blinked.
Paul started laughing.
Linnet, at the front of the room, looked suspicious, because let’s face it, when it’s five minutes into a discussion about a play where practically everyone starts out dead or ends up that way, hysterical laughter sort of draws attention.
“This is a time for discussion, not conversation,” Linnet said, glaring at us. She drifted ominously in our direction, like a jellyfish. She kept trying to not look at my hands.
“We are discussing.” I looked back to Dee, whose eyes darted between me and Linnet. “We were talking about the real-world implications of the lack of communication between Hamlet and Ophelia and what an ass-face Hamlet was for keeping Ophelia in the dark about what he was thinking.”
Sullivan would’ve appreciated my off-the-cuff analysis of the material—hey, at least I’d done the reading, right?—but Linnet frowned at me. “I’d prefer if you didn’t use that sort of language in my classroom.”
I turned my attention to her and tried to sound like I cared. “I’ll try and keep it PG-13 from now on.”
“Do that. I’m sure Mr. Sullivan doesn’t allow that in his class.” The way she said it had a distinct question mark on the end, as if she wasn’t sure.
I smiled at her.
Linnet’s frown deepened and she jellyfish-drifted her tentacles toward another discussion group.
Georgia glared at me, tapped her pencil on her notebook, and said, “I think I identify most with Horatio, because—”
“Maybe Hamlet knew Ophelia wouldn’t get it,” Dee interrupted, and Georgia rolled her eyes in disgust. “Ophelia would’ve told Hamlet right off that what he was doing was stupid, without knowing the context.”
“You’re assuming that Ophelia didn’t know anything about what Hamlet was going through,” I said. “But Ophelia was there the first time, remember? She knows what back-stabbing freaks Gertrude and Claudius are. It’s not her first time around Denmark, Dee.”
“Hello, what are we talking about here?” Georgia asked. “Ophelia doesn’t know anything about Gertrude and Claudius. Hamlet only knows about Claudius murdering his father because of his father’s ghost, and Hamlet’s the only one the ghost spoke to. So Ophelia doesn’t know anything.”
I waved off Georgia and said to Dee, “Ophelia’s only clueless because Hamlet doesn’t trust Ophelia enough to confide in her. Apparently, he thinks he can do everything himself, which wasn’t true the first time and is definitely not true this time either. He should’ve let Ophelia help.”
Dee’s eyes were a little too bright; she blinked and they cleared. “Ophelia wasn’t exactly a great judge of character. She should’ve just stayed away from Hamlet like Polonius told her to. People only got hurt by being close to Hamlet. Everybody died because of him. He was right to drive Ophelia away.”
Georgia started to talk, but I leaned over my desk toward Dee and said, teeth gritted, “But Ophelia was in love with Hamlet.”
Dee stared at me and I stared back at her, sort of shocked that I’d said it, and then Paul broke the mood by saying, “I just figured it out. The whole gender-opposite metaphor was throwing me off. Sullivan must be Polonius. He’s got that whole father-figure to Ophelia thing going on.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” I told him, thumping back in my seat.
Georgia gestured at the board. “Does anyone want to talk about the second question?”
No one wanted to talk about the second question.
I crossed my arms over my chest. I felt a sort of beautiful detachment from the scene, a sort of objectivity that I never seemed to have when Dee was around. I was getting over her. I could actually be getting over her. “I just don’t think Hamlet should be taking Ophelia’s calls if he’s only going to lie to her,” I said. “Ophelia’s slowly coming to grips with Hamlet tearing out her heart and being just friends, but even just friends don’t lie to each other.”
Georgia made a face and started to speak, but Paul put a finger to his lips and watched Dee.
Dee’s voice was very quiet, and it wasn’t her school voice anymore. You know how everyone has two voices—the voice they use in public and the voice that’s just for you, the voice they use when you’re alone with them and nobody else can hear. She used that one, the one from last summer, back when I really believed we’d have summer upon summer without change. “Hamlet can’t stand to see Ophelia get hurt again.”